cold water incomeing supply connected to gas pipe,switched on meter and water flowed out of cooker and flooded gas main, major transco job sucking the water out of the mains.

superb, just superb

actually the worst bit in our house is in the kitchen extension - not techincally a DIY bodge but a bit of a measurement error...

the extension was very carefully built with two chimneys, on the outside of the rear wall of the kitchen and on the side wall of the (brick) conservatory - one chimney was only to hide the boiler's hot water pipes, and the other was the real flue for the (solid fuel) boiler exhaust.

problem is someone forgot the old "measure twice, build once" advice

the result is that the boiler (a) doesn't quite fit in the corner, (b) doesn't line up with the chimney, meaning we have a mahoosive section of lovely hot twin wall flue with about 9 bends in it passing straight out of the kitchen into the conservatory before finally rejoining the chimney - it does keep the conservatory nice and warm, and (c) the pipes didn't line up with the other chimney either, so they're all completely exposed too.

^^ sounds like friend's new house. PU pipe and copper pipe joined just by jamming the 2 together. Hot water feed to bath. Presumably the coefficient of expansion of copper and plastic differ. Made tracing the source of the leak much easier when the water p1551ng thru the ceiling and down the kitchen wall was actually hot.

Dutch plumbing and electrics was dire when I lived there. They're cheaper than certain stereotypical demographics in the UK. Wire was *really* invented by 2 dutchmen fighting over a a 1 cent coin.

Combi boiler needed topping up weekly in summer, and daily in winter. No clue where the water went, but It wasn't into our apartment. Take a shower and you had 4 minutes exactly. After that, you'd be scorched to death and the boiler would trip off. No gas technician / plumber ever managed to sort that until they ripped the whole lot out (was less than 10yrs old) and started again.

Pipe work was apparently a bit "iffy". So they fit a restrictor by the meter to lower the pressure. Nice one. Shame it took 20 minutes for a cistern to refill (and only take about 2/3rd of the water a UK bog takes!). So if there's more than one resident, make sure you don't do a double-flusher in the morning else one of you will be late for work.

Electrics - only plugs in bathroom/kitchen are fully earthed. The rest are unearthed 2 pin, and fitted to walls made from panels with the consistency of chalk, held together by the wallpaper.

The entire chimney breast wall in the living room was clad in brick effect hardboard panelling. There was a cabinet in one of the alcoves with a 2 gang socket next to it, that two was wired into another two gang with a plug and wire behind the unit which in turn was fixed to a bit of skirting board which wasn't attached to anything.

There's other sockets dotted around the house where the cables have been chased into the wall (just) then had polyfilla thrown over it and it's lumper than a lumpy thing.

The there's the damp (on all but 3 walls), which is a result of a combination of blocked airbricks, knackered gutters, a downside that empties onto the floor and render that goes all the way to ground level.

The CH pipes run behind the skirting gert big boxing upstairs in our place, which has been taken right upto the sockets. Thus the sockets have been rendered just about useless as there's no room for the flex to, well flex, and allow the plug to be pushed into the socket! Plug adaptors a plenty..

OP, is it a combi? Mine is having similar issues and apparently it's a valve within the boiler that should stay closed to the rad circuit.

Who the hell knows. It was listed as a combi in the particulars but there is a hot water tank and the hot water is on a timer. Lucky we budgeted for a new system in the purchase price.

New bit of fun now as well.

Yesterday evening while sitting on the turbo trainer in the garage I was looking round and spotted a tap dissapearing into the wall. Who knows what it is for! Just the handle of a tap dissapearing into a wall and painted in!

The big question being... do I turn the tap to see what happens or leave well alone?!

1 light just inside the front door that appears to be permanently wired to live mains. Only been here 10 years, and never found the appropriate switch. Currently fixed by having a bulb half screwed in, but not making contact.

1 set of on-off remote relay switches, that trigger the relays in the main breaker panel. Never found what they are actually connected to.

Also got a PIR sensor in the bathroom. Thought it might be handy to turn lights on/off, but seems to be wired only to an extractor fan. Might just replace it with a normal on-off switch, cos the only way to trun the extractor on/off is a tiny switch under the PIR that's designed to select between Off, On or PIR mode.

We have also discovered that the pipe feeding upstairs outside tap is concreted into our wall, runs off our meter, and is not isolated from the water supply i.e. if it froze and split, we would be in a bit of a pickle.

Boiler located in a cupboard in a wet room no visible vent on the outside wall
After noticing a few other possible shortcuts we decided not to put an offer in on that house, despite it being, on first glance,our ideal property
It never sold, strangely as was well priced, is now off the market
Can't think why

In a rental house that was formally the landlords parents.
Tiles that were all square then a line just drifting off on the side on a sort of lame arc with heaps of grout between them.
Aga upstairs (house was bedrooms downstairs/living upstairs actually a good idea) the oil feed pipe from the reservoir half way up the wall as a corkscrew of pipe that constantly air locked.

My dad had re done a bathroom and got all the pipes in properly behind the wall then planned to hang the towel rail and connect it up - on Christmas eve. We got going with this task at which point on of his joints came loose, cue stuffing towels into the void and rushing off to cut up spanners and reweld them into an angle that would fit. Later on I asked why he wasn't going to use flexible pipe to connect it...

The plumber who first tried to do the bathroom in my missus house managed to fit the bath the wrong way round so the drain went uphill and non of the tiles sealed.

When some friends bought their first house they invited both sets of parents round to see what they thought, everything that was pointed at as being nice or wow what a good idea was removed with a sledge hammer

I can only mention the "rustic" kitchen extension ( meant to be a crude conservatory I think) which had a rough feeling floor. I lifted the carpet to find patio tiles underneath. The same guy (apparently fancied himself as a local builder until the bungalow he was building in the village collapsed) who had put a four foot long window on downstairs but forgot the minor decorative detail of a lintel.

andytherocketeer - Member
Also have some mysterious things in my current place.

1 light just inside the front door that appears to be permanently wired to live mains. Only been here 10 years, and never found the appropriate switch. Currently fixed by having a bulb half screwed in, but not making contact.

this would be a better bodge to fix that mate - ww.ebay.co.uk/itm/Sound-Control-Activated-Light-Bulb-E27-Base-/251014278429?pt=UK_Light_Bulbs&hash=item3a719ded1d

the entire kitchen in this house was painted in tangerine gloss.
i mean the walls, ceiling, welsh dresser, doors, kitchen units, everything bar the quarry tiles on the floor.
took me ages to deal with that- couldn't paint over and it was two thick coats that had to be scraped and sanded off. the dresser went in my dads caustic tank though and is beautiful

@jonah tonto: will check the ebay link later from home, but sound activated could be interesting. Just glad that here everything is E27 rather than bayonet.

Anyone know how useful those mains wire detectors are? mainly, how deep in to walls to they detect live wires? on the other side of the wall is an external light that's obviously on a circuit for the communal areas of the apartment block. And yes I have checked that my perma-light is not connected to communal leccy (would have been a handy source of free power). Don't intend doing any work, but would be handy to know what goes where.

The roof was only held on by 4 nails (and the weight of the roof, obviously) - we found out when we had an extension build.
When we had a new carpet fitted and the grip stip was nailed down, it rupture the central heat pipes going to the radiators - as they were only 2 mm below the concrete.

The roof has been made from an assortment of timber liberated from building sites

The was no external vent for the boiler ( BTW we rectified that- after 8 years)

All this was pointed out by the builder who did our extension - he did a really good job. But left a 30cm gap between the joins between the two roofs - I alway wondered why it sounded like there were birds walking around in the roof space ...

Move house 11 months ago and started to strip the wallpaper off a bedroom (future library) and found that someone had skimmed the walls over wallpaper and it all crumbled away. A 2 day job to strip the wallpaper turned into a 2 week project before i could put new paper up.